


Why not live sweetly?

by Lilliburlero



Category: Patrick Melrose (TV), Patrick Melrose novels - Edward St Aubyn
Genre: Age Difference, Anal Fingering, Bad Sex, Bathroom Sex, Canon-Typical Nastiness, Class Issues, Consent Issues, Emotional Manipulation, Extremely Dubious Consent, Humiliation, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Misogyny, Oral Sex, Period Typical Attitudes, Semi-Public Sex, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-16
Updated: 2018-09-16
Packaged: 2019-07-04 05:42:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15834909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: 'He used to come down to see me at school and take me to Sunday lunch at the Compleat Angler.'*Note: David Melrose makes you wish you hadn't wasted 'is his own exhaustive list of content warnings' on much more innocuous specimens, and frankly, Nicholas Pratt isn't far behind, but I think the warnings and tags pretty much cover it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [disenchanted](https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/gifts).



> — a humble gift of awful people being awful to each other, in hope of many happy returns.

The postcard came entangled in the string undercarriage of a parcel from his old nanny, which he could hardly be expected to open straight away, if at all; it probably contained a half-pound box of Turkish Delight, a scarf hand-knitted in his house colours, or a copy of _Eric_ : his first impulse, to spare himself the mortification of discovering what unmentionable atrocity lay within, had been to fling it straight onto the fire. At the thought of how easily he might have also destroyed a communication in itself precious, but which was moreover a ticket to greater pleasures, Nicholas felt the same unaccommodated terror and fury that possessed him whenever he thought he had lost its author’s regard and friendship with a banal or crass remark. He would beat the fag who had brought him his post in such disorder, if he could remember which it was: he remembered only a puffball mushroom head balanced frailly on an ink-stained collar, and they all looked like that. Perhaps he would beat them all. No, too much effort.

He savoured the postcard again; no-one he knew had a hand so absolutely characteristic; a glance at the serpentine curves and abrupt spikes recalled the honey and acid of the voice.

> My dear Pratt—

The possessive pronoun was of three years’ standing, since their first lunch à deux, but it still had the capacity to thrill; on the surname he almost choked with pride: that was, paradoxically, a new intimacy, marking a promotion from friend’s son to friend in his own right. 

> Passing your way Sunday 1130 on my way to—well, I mustn’t say, must I? Be like dad, stuff mum's face. Meet T & P—

That was the Crown & Cushion, known as the Tiara & Pouf for no reason other than the indiscriminate salacity of boys: it was a dismal little hole, into which no sort of queen had ever set dainty foot, and firmly out of bounds.

> —be prompt, you dozy b—.

The dash was not coyness, but a tribute to the eighteenth century, a time when things were done properly. _So delightful, don’t you think, that convention of blanking an obscenity? Like gauzy knickers over a hymen that one’s just rather mercilessly torn. Nothing’s concealed, and no-one’s innocence is preserved, but one’s suddenly amused enough to go at it again._ The shadow of the raging, painful erection precipitated by those words, in (oh!) that voice, passed behind Nicholas’s trouser-front.

> I shan’t wait. We’ll have the best, as much as poss., or nothing at all.
> 
> ―D. G. de N. M.

_Could_ he mean—? What _else_ could he mean? Nicholas wondered if he had time before first div. to toss off, and decided, irritably, that he didn’t. When he did, after a day spent in an aggravated variant of the senior public schoolboy’s unhurried half-alertness, it was David Melrose’s drawl, languidly describing the pillage of ripening virginity, that he brought to mind.

* * *

Le Goff’s study, with its leaded windows, shabby armchairs and worn Turkey carpet, its book-lined walls, overflowing waste paper basket and all-pervading smell of Craven mixture, might have been designed to reassure a paraffin wax millionaire about to deposit his son of its occupant's pastoral reliability and quintessential Englishness. If Le Goff had not in fact possessed these qualities it would not have been so vulgar, Nicholas reflected, trying to work the thought into more epigrammatic form. Le Goff (nicknamed, naturally, The Amputee) was fortyish, unmarried, athletic in an offhand, individualistic manner—he had been an Olympic fencer and climbed Napes Needle with S.J. Randall, who wrote all those frightful mountaineering books with the boyish, clean-limbed jokes. He wanted to join up and the Head Man was reluctant to let him go. Nicholas knew his housemaster disliked him.

‘Ah, Pratt.’ Le Goff turned from his laden desk. ‘What is it?’

‘May I have leave to go out for lunch on Sunday, sir?’

‘With whom?’

‘A friend of my father’s. He’s departing on active service and—’

Le Goff squeezed the bridge of his nose and put out his hand. ‘I don’t see why not. May I see the letter making the arrangement?’

‘Yes sir.’ Nicholas made a deprecating face. ‘It—there's some soldierly language, sir.’ He touched the postcard in his pocket, burning burning burning.

'By which you mean unsoldierly.' 

Le Goff waggled his fingers acquisitively. Nicholas handed the postcard to him, blushing at the suburbanism he had only used because he thought it was the sort of thing Le Goff himself might say. Le Goff perused it for a moment, affecting a middle-aged long-sightedness that had not yet really descended on him. He looked up and said sweetly, unsmilingly, ‘Construe.’

‘D—I mean—um, I’m to meet him at half past eleven on Sunday morning.’

‘Astonishingly, that’s the part my limited intellect managed to grasp. Who is the possessor of this distinguished string of initials, and where is the elusive T & P at which he proposes you meet?’

Bastard. He knew. He was just making him say it, which meant he hadn’t been dropping the name of Melrose with the suavity he’d imagined. A prickle of sweat started behind his ear and he could smell himself, the school smell of serge and acrid boyhood, beneath his cherished Trumper's cologne. ‘David Melrose, sir. And he means the Crown and Cushion—it’s a bit of a joke. I’m sure you’ve heard—’

‘Out of bounds,’ Le Goff murmured, flipping the postcard as if he were about to perform a conjuring trick with it.

‘Yes sir, but I expect he’d forgotten, sir—’ Why was he saying ‘sir’ at the end of every breath like a bloody third former?

‘You’ll have to dash rather, if you’re to make it after chapel.’

The fucker. The utter fucking _fucker_. ‘Oh, sir—thanks, but I had rather hoped—early Communion—’

‘Don’t push it, Pratt.’

Nicholas stepped forward to reclaim the card from his extended hand, but Le Goff drew back.

‘Melrose,’ he said. ‘He was before my time.’ Le Goff was a Wykehamist. In general no-one thought the worse of him for it, but Nicholas did, and never more so than at that moment.

‘Yes, sir. I don’t think you would have been here at the same time, even if you know, you had been, sir. He’s rather younger.’

Dammit, that went abominably wide. Le Goff giggled, as he did when he returned a tear to some unfortunate innumerate.

‘If there’s one thing everyone discovers too late, Pratt, it’s that what we Englishmen have a habit of calling affection disguised as—something nastier—isn’t actually wearing any disguise.’

What moralising bollocks. Nicholas knew David Melrose was truly vicious. He just didn’t think it mattered, as long as you had the capacity to be amused by it. It was David’s interlocutor who must don the alchemical robes and vizard, transmuting meanness into golden glee. That had a Yeatsian ring; Nicholas, who had recently stumbled across _The Tower_ and been entranced by the doctrine of aristocratic self-delight, was rather proud of it. He wouldn’t waste it on the Amputee.

‘He’s very brilliant,’ he said, with a pious, ingenuous half-bow from the hip. ‘But disappointed, you know. I think young people’s company does him a lot of good, sir. And since he’s shipping out, it might be the last—’

‘Always too late, as I said. But if you can make it in time from Morning Service—to your attendance at which I will pay especial attention—you may have leave to go. Be back by six, please. Now, is there anything else?’

‘The—p-postcard?’

‘Ah yes,’ Le Goff returned it with another of his disconcerting giggles. 

* * *

Nicholas took the postcard from his breast pocket on several secluded occasions that afternoon and evening, but it was no good: it was tainted by the narrow, canting good sense of the British pedagogue, its louche aura gone forever. At last he made a burnt offering of it, dangling it in the air until he couldn’t bear the heat of the licking flame any longer.

With furious, blistered fingertips he scrabbled at the parcel that still lay unopened on his desk. Inside was a dented toffee tin bearing a corroded picture of a crinolined maiden simpering on the arm of a hussar. What the hell had the demented old cow sent him now? Disdaining the accompanying sheet of blue writing-paper, he prised open the tin, wincing.

It was full of photographs: of him, of his mother and father, of his stepmother and half-sisters, his grandparents. Each bore a solemn pencilled legend on the back, in appalling Victorian board-school copperplate: Hawkstone Servants' Ball Christmas '10, Sir Nicholas MFH Ludlow Hunt 1912, Sir Nich. & undergamekeeper (Oct. '13??), Lady Pratt and Children of the Estate Summer Pageant Jul 27th 1914, Maj. Thomas Pratt 5th batt. Grenadier Guards 1915, Miss Frogmore and Miss Maude Frogmore picnic Hawkstone July 1919, marriage of Maj. Thom. and Hon. Miss Maude Frogmore June 1921, Sir Nich. and Lady Pratt & Baby Nicky Hawkstone summer '23, marriage of Maj. Thomas & Miss Irene Ramsbottom Feb ’24, Mrs Pratt w/ Baby Daphy Brittany August '25, Sir Nich. and Nicky Palm Court Ritz Hotel Jul. '28, Misses Pratt May Day Hawkstone '30, Nicky departing Dragon Sch. Sept. '30, Sir Thom. & friends shooting Warter Priory Oct. '32 (one of the guns was David Melrose, wearing a Prince of Wales check loud enough to communicate through the monochrome), Nicky Page Boy for ROYAL WEDDING Duke of Kent and Princess Marina Nov. 1934—fuck fucking fuck fuck fuck, it was _insupportable_. He sat down and picked up the note.

> Dear Nicky,
> 
> I do hope this finds you well and you are continuing to prosper at school. If my arithmetic is right your schooldays will presently be drawing to a close, and perhaps before long we shall see you in uniform serving King and Country as your father before. I know you will be anxious to do your duty, for though the prospect seems dark I'm sure it as Mr Churchill says and Great Britain and her Empire will prevail.
> 
> I am in good spirits but my arthritis has lately worsened and so I can no longer manage the stairs in my old rooms at Islington, especially when there is an Air Raid. So I am going to live with my married sister Mrs Beautyman in Raleigh where she has a spacious little bungalow with a verandah (address overleaf). As a P.G., of course, since I have the Annuity settled on me by Sir Nicholas in his Will, a retired spinster should not be a burden on her relations in these emancipated days! But because I shall only have a bedroom to myself and much less room to stow things than in the old rooms I am sending you these few “snaps” that your dear Grandmother was kind enough to give me on occasions, but which now that I am no longer in the employ of your family I think ought to be yours. I hope they bring you pleasant memories of times gone by and that you can show the fellows at school something of your gay and gracious Home. It is so important to remember the happy times.
> 
> Well now I must draw to a close, as I am very behindhand with the packing for my removals. I pray for you success and happiness always my dear.
> 
> God Bless, & Believe Me
> 
> Yours Sincerely,
> 
> —SALLY SMURTHWAITE

Nicholas let the coarse paper drop onto the spread photographs, wishing for the mawkish release of tears. As usual, they did not come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a tear: an exceptionally bad piece of work, which at this date at Eton would be returned to the offending boy ripped down the middle.


	2. Chapter 2

The sermon was given by a horrendous little man with some kind of Northern accent, allegedly the Archdeacon of Starbridge, who looked as if at any moment he might disclose that he had gone to his marriage bed 'clean,' except for a 'disastrous lapse' following his introduction to champagne while up at Oxford. ‘Up’ would be pronounced with the very slightest consciousness of correct idiom, and the female ‘in question’ would have been a Woolworth’s shopgirl. Nicholas mentally filed this observation for further use, and concentrated his thoughts upon willing him to keep it under twenty minutes. Miraculously, he did, but Nicholas was still obliged to rise in the hazy interstice between the end of the processional hymn and the organ voluntary (a social rather than a spiritual offence, especially in a Pop hopeful) and sidle along the wall to the south door. Once on the Long Walk he bolted, not waiting even to consult the timepiece that would tell him he had the best part of half a mile to go and two minutes to do it in.

Filthy filthy people thronged the pavement in front of him; he leapt into the road to a derisive bleat from some oiks lounging around a bollard— _Oooon vee fahrm, evry Froidee_ … 

He came round the bend at Tom Brown’s to the sight of a green MG J-type parked outside the Crown and Cushion, but as he passed New & Lingwood a tall, unmistakable figure, trim in tailored khaki and scarlet cap, jogged lightly down the inn’s front steps towards the car. His nose and throat burning as if he’d been gargling with horseradish, Nicholas opened his mouth to shout, but choked on the point of nomenclature. Like most young people of good family, he habitually addressed elders of his own social class and in no formal position of authority over him with a polite silence where in other circumstances a name or honorific might be, and consequently, needing to summon the attention of one of these, emitted only a loutish, strangled hiccough of which nobody could be expected to take notice. David Melrose looked lightly and unseeingly around, the yobs roared _BANG—BANG—BANG_ , somehow the tails of Nicholas’s coat had become intimately and inconveniently involved with his thighs, a small object, bottle cap or pebble, whizzed past his cheek (fortunately no townie had anything that could be dignified with the name of aim), David vaulted accurately into the driving seat, Nicholas trod in an ankle-deep puddle, sending a splatter to mid-thigh, and nearly lost the top hat crammed onto his brow, and stumbled on to the sound of a shrill whistle, the oiks or a policeman moving them on, who the hell could care less, Nicholas felt himself the most conspicuous object in the world, but apparently not, because David glanced casually over his shoulder and turned the starter. With thirty feet between Nicholas and its bumper, the car pulled away—how in the holy name of fuck had David not seen—of course, Nicholas realised, swallowing fiery air, it was David Melrose, he _had_.

He didn’t relent until the lane skirting the South Meadow met the Eton Wick Road, by which time Nicholas didn’t know whether to weep, vomit, collapse, or all three. David pulled up onto the verge and leaned over to open the passenger door. Nicholas staggered towards it, preserving himself from the ditch only by clinging to the folded hood, not that it really mattered much, his trousers were caked.

‘You’re in damn poor condition, Nicholas. Can’t have that, there’s a fucking war on. Tell you what, I’ll chuck you out again a few furlongs outside Marlow. Earn your bloody nosebag.’

Nicholas hauled himself into the passenger side. There was nothing for it except to laugh, but the sound he made, ingratiating and effete, appalled him.

‘I’m not joking.’ Mortified, sweaty and breathless as he was, Nicholas could see, now that he was up close, that David wasn’t in such prime shape himself: that graceful leap into the car had probably cost his joints more than it would most men of thirty-four. His knuckles, cramped around the gearstick and the wheel, had an unhealthy mauve sheen; he’d consumed enough of his preferred analgesic for Nicholas to be able to distinguish it on his breath when he turned upon him with a gaze of penetrating but reassuringly theatrical distaste. ‘Disgusting state. How old are you? Eighteen?’

‘Last month,’ Nicholas coughed, looking down into the frayed, soiled interior of his hat.

David took in his turn-down collar, black waistcoat and pinstriped trousers. ‘Time’s running out,’ he remarked, pleasantly unpleasant. There would be two more Pop elections before Nicholas left, which, in reality, meant one—to be appointed only in one’s last half, a consolation prize for senescence, was worse than not being elected at all, it must not happen. He said so, and David, chuckling and placated, pulled out into the path of a luckless cyclist, who braked and toppled, shouting imprecations.

The exercise of a little light persecution always put David in good anecdotal form: he sparkled for the half-hour drive to the Compleat Angler; Nicholas was required to contribute only laughter, which he did sincerely, and twice to light them both a cigarette, placing one reverently on David’s lips, which earned him a melting smile.

The chill mist on the Thames at Marlow was tinted by low November noontide; the towers of the suspension bridge thrust up dark through the gilt-edged swirls. It would be good to fuck a girl without taking off her white and gold cami-knickers, to rub your prick about a bit under the silk, see how it looked outlined against the fabric before you went into her, Nicholas thought. He’d never had a woman. David had promised him an excursion to Paris but the war intervened, and English whores were no better than amateurs, you might as well have the pleasure of seduction and defilement of respectability instead. Nicholas had no idea how one went about seducing and defiling respectability; he wasn't sure—unless the improbably pert, juicy new upper-housemaid at the Hawkstone Dower House counted—he'd ever encountered any he particularly wanted to seduce and defile.

‘You might duck into the cloaks and give those bags of yours a brush,’ said David, being an Edwardian swell. ‘You ain’t lookin’ quite top-drawer, you know.’ The impersonation was modelled on Nicholas’s grandfather, and absurdly, brought a lump to his throat. To ascribe unkind intent to it would be to acknowledge that David knew what a wet he could be; he swallowed both thought and lump firmly.

By the time he had restored a degree of decency to his trousers, David was settled in the bar with a ’34 Veuve Clicquot, in gleeful flout of the convention of their people—rooted County gentry, in their fashion sober—that champagne should be served only with dinner, unless at a wedding breakfast.

‘I had, as you know, seven aunts,' David said, 'whom I remember chiefly as forming a stockade of violet bombazine, from which I could ransom myself only with an intolerable deal of Chopin—but thanks to one enlarged heart and the perseverance of the Luftwaffe, now I have only six, and the seventh witch is transmuted into a little pile of gold.’ He tapped the foil on the bottle neck. ‘Nothing but the best, or go without.’

Nicholas wondered how the invariable maxim would assort with the new restrictions upon restaurant meals. He had never seen David in a bate with a waiter, but he'd overheard his father describe one to George Watford, in terms as formalised as a Norse skald recounting trial by combat. At the time, with every schoolboy's love of a row, he'd thought it sounded magnificent, but reflecting on it now amid oak-panelling and well-bred murmurs, he wasn't entirely sure that it wouldn't just be a tremendously embarrassing and lowering scuffle. But when it came to the point, it seemed to amuse Lt Melrose of the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars to be wryly patriotic about the choice of Salade Grande Duchesse or Crème Parmentier and the proscription of a fish course.

‘Until just the other week, sir,’ the waiter confided, ‘we did find it possible to offer diners—of a certain standing, naturally—some supplementaries to the advertised fare, but since the _very_ regrettable court proceeding—an example was being made of us, we’re certain, since a number of less prominent establishments—well, it’s not a question of procurement, sir, just of the adverse publicity.’

‘Procurement,’ David echoed, reproducing the strained, genteel vowels, his face impassive with hilarity. ‘Publicity.’

Nicholas had never noticed before that the suppression of laughter was physically analogous to sexual stimulation, or perhaps it wasn’t, outside David’s libertine ambience. The relief, when they were left alone with their hors d’oeuvres, was explosive: Nicholas howled into his green beans, julienned potato and mayonnaise.

Over the joint—of a pre-war standard that justified the unfashionably early hour of its consumption—their conversation became lubricious by degrees. Alongside excitement, Nicholas felt a ridiculous disappointment: he had carefully composed an account of last summer’s Camp, a farrago even in wartime, perhaps especially in wartime. He had calibrated the story very precisely to amuse a serving officer whose own O.T.C. days were fifteen years distant, conducted under conditions of mute inglorious peace, and it was a bore that he would not, in all likelihood, manage to deliver it. Perhaps on the way back to school—but no, David was always rebarbative then. Anyway, even the pleasure of impressing his most exacting mentor could hardly compare to a grandstand view of the dining room as David recited, at a volume conversational but nonetheless carrying,

> Mon Rêve s'aboucha souvent à sa ventouse;  
>  Mon âme, du coït matériel jalouse,  
>  En fit son larmier fauve et son nid de sanglots.
> 
> C'est l'olive pâmée, et la flûte caline  
>  C'est le tube où descend la céleste praline:  
>  Chanaan féminin dans les moiteurs enclos!

It was clear from their faces that not one in twenty diners understood (if Nicholas were to be totally honest, his aural French wouldn’t have been up to it if David hadn’t already introduced him to the poem) though one of the waiters clearly did, and almost dropped his cargo of potato soup. But none of them could ignore what David said next, in the same resonant and champagne-blown voice, though being Englishmen and women, they all tried.

‘It’s eccentric of me, I daresay, but I do think the female is the proper object of buggery. One has the proper and appointed hole, just _there_ ,’ he sketched in the air, ‘glistening, and one chooses instead to enter at the strait gate and the narrow. That, physiologically speaking, it’s virtually impossible for her to experience pleasure in the act _itself_ —of course, some of them affect to enjoy the perversity, tiresome creatures—can only be an inducement.’

That suspensive silence, tender, friable, quivering, from which a social occasion might take any turn: hysteria, high dudgeon, violence, indissoluble camaraderie. Nicholas would spend the rest of his life in pursuit of it, achieving it perhaps more frequently than most people, but scarcely ever in proportion to the effort expended, and never enough to satisfy his craving. Nothing happened, this time: a party in the middle distance bravely took up the thread of their conversation, the dining room retracted into grateful chatter, and both Nicholas and David ordered the praline ice.

Pleased with his performance, David subsided into unexceptionable gossip. Nicholas thought this might be the moment for his Camp tale, but David excused himself before he could begin. When he returned, he said, ‘Someone was taken ill. We’re to use the lavatory at the head of the stairs back there until they clean up.’ The smooth tone, too soft to reach even the next table, was a infallible signal, as was the outrageous falsifiability of the excuse, but Nicholas could still hardly believe it. Before, they had always gone for a drive, and surely, surely, David couldn’t mean—after drawing attention to them like that: it was lunacy, impossibly perilous, pointless, life-wrecking—it was _David Melrose_. And before the force of that personality he was helpless. He couldn’t say why at eighteen, and he would not be able to say why at eighty.

‘Thanks, I’d been meaning to—’

The lavatory must have been meant for the use of an adjacent room, one with a washstand, because there was nothing in it but a porthole window and the crapper itself, a Victorian boxed-in affair occupying the three-foot breadth of the twelve-foot long closet. The allegorical impression of a passage leading to the humbling of mortal pride by the unruly body was emphasised by the wallpaper’s oppressive pattern of stylised peacocks. 

Nicholas realised he did actually need to piss and lifted the teak seat. There was something curiously satisfying about urinating onto a sort of toile-de-Jouy design of a nymph and shepherd under a willow among Arcadian ruins. Fuck pastoral. Fuck Theocritus and Virgil and the Pervirgilium Veneris and come-live-with-me-and-be-my-love. Fuck exquisite artificial simplicity. Fuck lyrical beauty. Fuck Western civilisation. He buttoned up, lowered the seat and sat down. He felt hollow, cold, brittle, like one of the bulrushes on the river beyond the porthole. This had to stop. It had gone on too long. He was too old. He had to say something to David. What could he say? Losing David’s friendship would kill him. He acknowledged this as melodrama as soon as he thought it; without David, he would not die. But David was the only interesting man he had ever met. Still, it couldn’t go on. A person shouldn’t—a person shouldn’t—to another person—

The thought was interrupted by a whistle, a low, sweet variation on Reveille. People loved David’s improvisations at the piano, begging him to repeat them, but he not only wouldn't, he _couldn’t_ do it, he didn’t know what he’d done in the first place. That was surely symbolic of something larger, Nicholas thought, but he couldn’t work out what, there was too much fog in his skull. He hadn’t locked the door, there seemed no need. But he would let David work that out for himself, which he did promptly, opening the door and shooting the bolt behind him. He didn’t acknowledge Nicholas in any way, just opened his flies and stepped towards the lavatory as if he were going to use it for the normal purpose. Perhaps he was, perhaps David was going to piss on him—the Captain of Champernowne’s, Pettingell, that was his thing, caused a bit of a hullaballoo, fags threatening to strike and so on, until he found one who claimed to like it. Perhaps he, Nicholas, wasn’t there at all, perhaps he was watching the scene unfold from some abject vantage, a fly on the wall or a mouse in the wainscot.

David put his hand on Nicholas’s shoulder and pushed him to his knees. He could refuse, put a stop to it right now. What was the worst that could happen? But of course he didn’t. He opened his mouth and obediently accepted David’s cock.

The first time this had happened—not the first time ever, but the first time he’d sucked David off—they’d driven into Surrey, and explored the grounds of a blowsy, grotesque hotel with a glassed-over courtyard for a tea-lounge and a new extension, already chipped and cheapening, housing a ballroom. A snaky pink-gravel path took them to a neglected terrace with a clogged and overgrown fountain in the middle; some steps led from there down into a hollow where they found a sort of Hansel-and-Gretel cottage. It had a twisted red-brick chimney, indigo slates on the roof, and a little white porch with pocked and crumbling scalloped mouldings. Nicholas was just re-entering the age at which he could find such a folly charming; his attraction to it retained a substantial component of embarrassment, which he assuaged by immediately and brutally jemmying one of the narrow dirt-clogged stained-glass windows with his penknife. Observing these from inside, they found they depicted St George, St Barbara, St Catherine and St Martin de Tours, which prompted David to expound upon Roman sexual mores, and thence upon the distinction between _fellatio_ and _irrumatio_. 

Nicholas had wanted to do it, and David had been kind to him afterwards, saying what a solace it was to his loneliness, how expertly Nicholas had taken what was, after all, the active part, how different this was from commonplace schoolboy traffic: it was a vulgar error to be sentimental about Athenian pederasty, but it really was the closest parallel here, to the detail of his being Nicholas’s father’s friend, and though the erotic dimension was of necessarily of short lease, such friendships were lifelong, surpassing and outlasting marriage. Beyond the place where the ceiling had half caved in was a small fireplace, shaped like a medieval tomb in a cathedral; the grate contained a pile of bird bones, probably a seagull’s, and everything smelled of death.

‘If you hang a seagull on the wall in Act One…’ Nicholas had said, and David laughed, ruffled his hair and kissed him warmly.

‘One of us has already gone off, my dear—the next act’s all yours.’

He was not minded to be generous now, or to pretend that Nicholas was ministering to him in his solitude and disappointment. His snot and spit dribbled inexorably onto David’s No. 2 Service Dress trousers, for which he would no doubt catch it hard from David’s poleaxing post-coital tristesse, and with every thrust he swallowed regurgitated salad, beef and heavenly praline. Still, in its way it was not so bad; a bit humiliating, that was all: one really ought to have left it behind with bum-freezers and Lower Chapel. The thought seemed to provoke one of the wayward, indiscriminate erections pertaining to fourteen. He wondered if he could get away with rubbing himself.

‘That’s enough,’ David said, as if Nicholas were doing something other than trying not to puke on his boots, and pulled back. ‘Take your coat off—and your waistcoat. Trousers down, please, and turn around.’

Nicholas wished he’d kept his voice steadier when he replied, ‘I thought the female was the proper object,’ but at least he did say it.

‘Defiance fits you even less well than your clothes, my dear, but you needn’t fret. Just a little light rubbing between the buttocks. Hurry _up_.’ He wrenched down Nicholas’s underpants, making him gasp as the waistband caught the tip of his prick. His back collar stud pinched as David put his hand on the back of his neck to bend him over, lifting the tails of his shirt. ‘Legs wider for me. Look straight ahead.’

Nicholas wasn’t sure why he was fighting his own arousal at this clinical pastiche; it was risible, of course, but he might as well try to get something out of the situation. The uncanny touch of hands not strong but _strengthened_ parted his buttocks; David hawked and landed a viscous glob between them, spreading the saliva with his thumb as he reached around with his other hand, rather, Nicholas sensed, to reassure himself of his own irresistible magnetism than to give Nicholas any pleasure. David spat and massaged again; Nicholas felt a sudden misgiving and made to turn his head.

‘Straight—’ David growled, and then it came, a flash of pain so acute that everything silvered over and cracked in two. ‘—ahead.’

Nicholas thought he might have screamed, but he hadn’t, because a distorted voice said, ‘Don’t whimper. It’s very unattractive.’ The voice continued and became David’s, ‘It’s only my finger, you little cretin.’ 

Indeed, it was strangely bearable now, an agreeable stinging, like menthol, and a fullness, as if he were having a really good shit. His vision started to return and his shallow breaths grew deeper. 

‘Haven’t you ever—' David said, 'no, you weren’t a pretty Tit, come to think. Must be why I waited so long to stick my cock in you, which I'm going to do just as soon as I’ve—’

The comfortable stuffedness turned to uncomfortable strain before an astonishing ripple surged through him, like touching an electrified wire, except he _was_ the electricity. And then it happened again. He shrieked into David’s claw, clamped fortuitously over his mouth. His semen stippled the peacocks, hitting one imbecilic specimen satisfyingly in its exaggerated beady eye, and slimed the lavatory seat. The connective tissues holding him together seemed to sag and he struggled for his next breath, but he didn’t much care if he made it or not. He supposed this was what those potty characters who actually liked getting winded in the Wall Game felt like afterwards. He wasn’t sure if David’s fingers were still in him, and then they withdrew, an indefinably nasty, collapsing sensation.

David was talking, and for the first time in his life Nicholas wasn’t listening to him. ‘—very useful—other people—important decisions—’ His prick was nudging at Nicholas’s distended, sensitive arsehole. ‘—hurt you, at least, I mean it to.’ This was going to be fucking agonising, worse than the first, world-rending time, because his own fun— _fun_ , he thought derisively—was so definitively over.

And then he was rescued, by a woman.

The voice was pert and shrill, with a hint of Bristol. ‘Shirl, this toilet don't ought to be locked, ought it?’

Shirl, evidently some distance away down the corridor, made some affirmative murmur, and the door handle rattled. ‘Excuse me, excuse me. These conveniences aren’t for use during the day, only for paying guests of the hotel.’

Nicholas, a strong and prudent swimmer, had never had an experience that came closer to the alleged effects of drowning. Not one’s life, and not ‘flashing’ exactly, but an extraordinarily vivid, rather over-exposed impression of successive dark-panelled chambers: the Head Man’s study, his father’s, the dock at Slough Magistrate’s Court—

David coughed, assertively masculine and yet oddly apologetic.

‘Not to worry, sir. I’m sure it was just a mistake. I’ll let you get on.’ Under the muffle of carpet, old floorboards creaked as the maid walked away.

Nicholas snorted, but David’s face, always inexpressive, was dangerously rigid. He pointed at the puddle of Nicholas’s clothes, and wordlessly adjusted his own. His trousers, waistcoat and shoes on, Nicholas attempted to wipe up his mess with a wad of lavatory paper, but David grabbed his shoulder and propelled him towards the door with a _never-explain_ grunt. He snatched his coat and stumbled out into the corridor, which was empty.

Delirious at their deliverance, Nicholas babbled, ‘I suppose we got away with it. Bloody marvellous. When you think, there is something jolly archetypal, an Eton man and a lieutenant of Hussars fucking in an hotel loo, sort of the English governing class in miniatu—’

David closed the door behind him and paused in the frame for a moment, surely conscious of the dramatic effect of his faultless good looks and uniform against the oak. Milton’s Satan addressing the fallen angels, Nicholas thought, except there was no scar, no hidden remorseful pain, only stillness.

‘I always knew you were a fool and a toady, Pratt, it’s congenital. But I didn’t think you were quite such a thoroughgoing bore.’

This time, the world really did split in two, and lay in neat halves at his feet, like an apple sliced in mid-air by a circus swordsman. The only possible response was crude frivolity: without really thinking, Nicholas reached for the provincial-rep pansy voice he’d been working on but hadn’t quite perfected for company yet.

'Sorry you feel that way, dearie. Perhaps when this filthy war is over, we can pick up where we left off—’

David’s hand darted out and gripped Nicholas’s bicep, hard enough that he would bear a reminder in the form of five small, spaced bruises for the next ten days. His narrowed eyes, flared nostrils and petulant underlip could not could not make him less than divinely handsome, or more than devilishly ugly.

‘Listen to me, you stupid cunt. Scot-Hallard passed me fit as a favour and Fattie Prout pulled some strings to stop me getting seconded to the medicos. Do you honestly think I’m—look here, Nicholas, the plain fact is I’m going out there to die.’

He released him with sufficient force to send him staggering against the dado on the other side of the corridor, and stalked back downstairs to the bar, where he punished him with Courvoisier XO and a Romeo y Julieta corona in an anticyclonic atmosphere of envenomed silence.

* * *

David Melrose did not die in Egypt, though he did contract typhus, which permanently ended a remarkably short period of active service. Nor, when his time came, did Nicholas Pratt sustain any injury—it would have been something out of the run of common ill-luck, while occupying a Whitehall post in Military Intelligence (Liaison).

By the time he went for lunch with David again, Nicholas was engaged to the first of his well-informed, intelligent daughters of the regiment (B.A. Hons, History, Somerville), and so of course, they did not pick things up where they had left off. They never did, and Nicholas felt the lack of it long after David’s horrific decline and death, never admitting it to anyone, not even himself, until one day, in an ambulance forging its way through rush-hour traffic on the Fulham Road, he looked up into the face of a hideous, wailing Banshee and said, quite clearly, ‘God, I wish David Melrose had buggered me properly.’

But he didn’t think she heard him. The oxygen mask was in the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pop: The Eton Society, the elite of the school; candidates for Pop are elected by the existing membership, on the lines of a gentleman's club, and members are distinguished by their stick-up collars, coloured waistcoats and houndstooth trousers.
> 
> The townies are singing [Run Rabbit Run](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmk8dbFv_o).
> 
> David recites ['Sonnet du Trou du Cul'](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E2%80%99Idole,_Sonnet_du_Trou_du_Cul), by Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. A selection of translations are given [here](http://www.practicalalchemy.com/troudecul.htm).
> 
> Tit: a new boy at Eton.
> 
> Wall Game: [The Eton Wall Game](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_wall_game).

**Author's Note:**

> Fic title, from Keats, ['I had a Dove, and the sweet Dove died'](https://www.poeticous.com/keats/i-had-a-dove-and-the-sweet-dove-died). The working title was '[the dead dove do not eat](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Dead_Dove:_Do_Not_Eat) Melrose fic' so I ran with it.


End file.
